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Should you always Code To Interfaces In Java [closed]
(6 answers)
What does it mean to "program to an interface"?
(33 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I believe that it's better to code to interfaces instead of implementations. In Java:
List<User> users = new ArrayList<User>();
There's no need to specify the runtime type of users all over the program if the code only cares that it implements List.
However, I encounter many people who believe that it's totally fine, even when they're not using properties specific to the ArrayList:
ArrayList<User> users = new ArrayList<User>();
I try to explain that it's redundancy and makes the program harder to change, but they don't seem to care. Are there other reasons that this is important? Or perhaps my convictions are overstated?
Personally, I think that there are two parts to this argument.
If you're returning an object from a method in a class, it should return the most generic object possible. In this case, if you had a choice between returning ArrayList<User> or List<User>, return List<User> because it makes life easier for the people consuming your class.
If you're coding inside of a method and you don't mind hard-coding a concrete type, go for it. It's not what I would do, and it will make your code more fragile in the future but since there are no outside dependencies on that concrete type (hence the first part), you're not going to break anybody that is consuming your code.
Testability is one reason. If you implement using implementations it is very difficult to mock out the required object and use it in tests. You usually end up extending the implementation and overriding which is painful.
It is extremely important if you want to use dependency injection. It is also important for hibernate -- you MUST specify an interface if you have a collection type, because hibernate provides its own collection implementations.
That said, you don't need to be pedantic about it -- sometimes it doesn't matter. Sometimes you want to specify concrete type to get at methods only available on that type.
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Prefer composition over inheritance?
(35 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
I am making a program for studying chess openings, traps and maybe other related things. It has a class MoveSequence, which basically is an ordered list of objects from a class ChessPosition. I also have a class ChessOpening which has a sequence of moves and a name, an ECO-code (chess opening classification system) and probably some more stuff.
Should I implement ChessOpening as a subclass of MoveSequence, or should it just contain a MoveSequence object? The same question would apply for a class ChessTrap.
Don't think it matter so much what I choose in this simple problem. But I want to learn this stuff, so I was wondering if there is some principles, or rules of thumb, one should consider when making decision like this.
My 0.02$ worth:
If a possible subclass does not share basically all of the properties and methods of its superclass, I start to wonder.
Overriding methods to change behavior, or adding new properties and methods is normal. But when you hit that awkwardness when some of the superclass properties/methods are not applicable to the subclass, it gets creepy. (What do you do then, just ignore the invalid/inappropriate parts? Hope no one ever calls them? Stub them out and raise an error if they are used?)
If xxx is not really a yyy, maybe xxx and yyy are both zzz's. (Or if they just share common behaviors, maybe create a module to include, which is a standard Ruby/Rails practice.)
A real Computer Scientist may have a more concise and definitive answer...
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Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Why Objective-C doesn't support method overloading?
I was going through this link which has the answer to my question. But I was not able to understand what the right guy is trying to say. It will be really great if someone can simplify and provide an explanation.
In C++ the compiler has type information and can choose between several methods based on the types. To do the same in Objective C it would have to be done at run-time, because the compiler knows little about object types due to the dynamic nature of the language (i.e. all objects are of type id). While this seems possible, it would be very inefficient in practice.
I think it's a historical artifact. Objective-C is derived from C and Smalltalk, and neither of them support overloading.
If you want overloading, you can use Objective-C++ instead. Just name your sources with the ".mm" extension instead of just ".m".
Just be careful to be sure you know what you are doing if you mix C++ and Objective-C idioms. For example Objective-C exceptions and C++ exceptions are two completely different animals and cannot be used interchangeable.
What he is trying to say is that method overloading is not possible with dynamic typed languages since in dynamic typed languages the information about each of the object is not known until run time. In a statically typed during compile time the overloading can be resolved. You will just create the same functions with same names but the compiler would have enough information to resolve the ambiguity between various calls which it gets. But in dynamic typed languages since the objects are resolved only during run time it is not possible to resolve between the various calls.
In this video from Google IO 2009, the presenter very quickly says that signatures of methods should return concrete types instead of interfaces.
From what I heard in the video, this has something to do with the GWT Java-to-Javascript compiler.
What's the reason behind this choice ?
What does the interface in the method signature do to the compiler ?
What methods can return interfaces instead of concrete types, and which are better off returning concrete instances ?
This has to do with the gwt-compiler, as you say correctly. EDIT: However, as Daniel noted in a comment below, this does not apply to the gwt-compiler in general but only when using GWT-RPC.
If you declare List instead of ArrayList as the return type, the gwt-compiler will include the complete List-hierarchy (i.e. all types implementing List) in your compiled code. If you use ArrayList, the compiler will only need to include the ArrayList hierarchy (i.e. all types implementing ArrayList -- which usually is just ArrayList itself). Using an interface instead of a concrete class you will pay a penalty in terms of compile time and in the size of your generated code (and thus the amount of code each user has to download when running your app).
You were also asking for the reason: If you use the interface (instead of a concrete class) the compiler does not know at compile time which implementations of these interfaces are going to be used. Thus, it includes all possible implementations.
Regarding your last question: all methods CAN be declared to return interface (that is what you ment, right?). However, the above penalty applies.
And by the way: As I understand it, this problem is not restricted to methods. It applies to all type declarations: variables, parameters. Whenever you use an interface to declare something, the compiler will include the complete hierarchy of sub-interfaces and implementing classes. (So obviously if you declare your own interface with only one or two implementing classes then you are not incurring a big penalty. That is how I use interfaces in GWT.)
In short: use concrete classes whenever possible.
(Small suggestion: it would help if you gave the time stamp when you refer to a video.)
This and other performance tips were presented at Google IO 2011 - High-performance GWT.
At about the 7 min point the speak addresses 'RPC Type Explosion':
For some reason I thought the GWT compiler would optimize it away again but it appears I was mistaken.
At my old C++ job, we always took great care in encapsulating member variables, and only exposing them as properties when absolutely necessary. We'd have really specific constructors that made sure you fully constructed the object before using it.
These days, with ORM frameworks, dependency-injection, serialization, etc., it seems like you're better off just relying on the default constructor and exposing everything about your class in properties, so that you can inject things, or build and populate objects more dynamically.
In C#, it's been taken one step further with Object initializers, which give you the ability to basically define your own constructor. (I know object initializers are not really custom constructors, but I hope you get my point.)
Are there any general concerns with this direction? It seems like encapsulation is starting to become less important in favor of convenience.
EDIT: I know you can still carefully encapsulate members, but I just feel like when you're trying to crank out some classes, you either have to sit and carefully think about how to encapsulate each member, or just expose it as a property, and worry about how it is initialized later. It just seems like the easiest approach these days is to expose things as properties, and not be so careful. Maybe I'm just flat wrong, but that's just been my experience, espeically with the new C# language features.
I disagree with your conclusion. There are many good ways of encapsulating in c# with all the above mentioned technologies, as to maintain good software coding practices. I would also say that it depends on whose technology demo you're looking at, but in the end it comes down to reducing the state-space of your objects so that you can make sure they hold their invariants at all times.
Take object relational frameworks; most of them allow you to specify how they are going to hydrate the entities; NHibernate for example allows you so say access="property" or access="field.camelcase" and similar. This allows you to encapsulate your properties.
Dependency injection works on the other types you have, mostly those which are not entities, even though you can combine AOP+ORM+IOC in some very nice ways to improve the state of these things. IoC is often used from layers above your domain entities if you're building a data-driven application, which I guess you are, since you're talking about ORMs.
They ("they" being application and domain services and other intrinsic classes to the program) expose their dependencies but in fact can be encapsulated and tested in even better isolation than previously since the paradigms of design-by-contract/design-by-interface which you often use when mocking dependencies in mock-based testing (in conjunction with IoC), will move you towards class-as-component "semantics". I mean: every class, when built using the above, will be better encapsulated.
Updated for urig: This holds true for both exposing concrete dependencies and exposing interfaces. First about interfaces: What I was hinting at above was that services and other applications classes which have dependencies, can with OOP depend on contracts/interfaces rather than specific implementations. In C/C++ and older languages there wasn't the interface and abstract classes can only go so far. Interfaces allow you to tie different runtime instances to the same interface without having to worry about leaking internal state which is what you're trying to get away from when abstracting and encapsulating. With abstract classes you can still provide a class implementation, just that you can't instantiate it, but inheritors still need to know about the invariants in your implementation and that can mess up state.
Secondly, about concrete classes as properties: you have to be wary about what types of types ;) you expose as properties. Say you have a List in your instance; then don't expose IList as the property; this will probably leak and you can't guarantee that consumers of the interface don't add things or remove things which you depend on; instead expose something like IEnumerable and return a copy of the List, or even better, do it as a method:
public IEnumerable MyCollection { get { return _List.Enum(); } } and you can be 100% certain to get both the performance and the encapsulation. Noone can add or remove to that IEnumerable and you still don't have to perform a costly array copy. The corresponding helper method:
static class Ext {
public static IEnumerable<T> Enum<T>(this IEnumerable<T> inner) {
foreach (var item in inner) yield return item;
}
}
So while you can't get 100% encapsulation in say creating overloaded equals operators/method you can get close with your public interfaces.
You can also use the new features of .Net 4.0 built on Spec# to verify the contracts I talked about above.
Serialization will always be there and has been for a long time. Previously, before the internet-area it was used for saving your object graph to disk for later retrieval, now it's used in web services, in copy-semantics and when passing data to e.g. a browser. This doesn't necessarily break encapsulation if you put a few [NonSerialized] attributes or the equivalents on the correct fields.
Object initializers aren't the same as constructors, they are just a way of collapsing a few lines of code. Values/instances in the {} will not be assigned until all of your constructors have run, so in principle it's just the same as not using object initializers.
I guess, what you have to watch out for is deviating from the good principles you've learnt from your previous job and make sure you are keeping your domain objects filled with business logic encapsulated behind good interfaces and ditto for your service-layer.
Private members are still incredibly important. Controlling access to internal object data is always good, and shouldn't be ignored.
Many times private methods I've found to be overkill. Most of the time, if the work you're doing is important enough to break out, you can refactor it in such a way that either a) the private method is trivial, or b) is an integral part of other functions.
In addition, with unit testing, having many methods private makes it very hard to unit test. There are ways around that (making test objects friends, etc), but add difficulties.
I wouldn't discount private methods entirely though. Any time there's important, internal algorithms that really make no sense outside of the class there's no reason to expose those methods.
I think that encapsulation is still important, it helps more in libraries than anything imho. You can create a library that does X, but you don't need everyone to know how X was created. And if you wanted to create it more specifically to obfuscate the way you create X. The way I learned about encapsulation, I remember also that you should always define your variables as private to protect them from a data attack. To protect against a hacker breaking your code and accessing variables that they are not supposed to use.
I have class method that returns a list of employees that I can iterate through. What's the best way to return the list? Typically I just return an ArrayList. However, as I understand, interfaces are better suited for this type of action. Which would be the best interface to use? Also, why is it better to return an interface, rather than the implementation (say ArrayList object)? It just seems like a lot more work to me.
Personally, I would use a List<Employee> for creating the list on the backend, and then use IList when you return. When you use interfaces, it gives you the flexability to change the implementation without having to alter who's using your code. If you wanted to stick with an ArrayList, that'd be a non-generic IList.
# Jason
You may as well return IList<> because an array actually implements this interface.
The best way to do something like this would be to return, as you say, a List, preferably using generics, so it would be List<Employee>.
Returning a List rather than an ArrayList means that if later you decide to use, say, a LinkedList, you don't have to change any of the code other than where you create the object to begin with (i.e, the call to "new ArrayList())".
If all you are doing is iterating through the list, you can define a method that returns the list as IEnumerable (for .NET).
By returning the interface that provides just the functionality you need, if some new collection type comes along in the future that is better/faster/a better match for your application, as long as it still implements IEnumerable you can completely rewrite your method, using the new type inside it, without changing any of the code that calls it.
Is there any reason the collection needs to be ordered? Why not simply return an IEnumerable<Employee>? This gives the bare minimum that is required - if you later wanted some other form of storage, like a Bag or Set or Tree or whatnot, your contract would remain intact.
I disagree with the premise that it's better to return an interface. My reason is that you want to maximize the usefulness a given block of code exposes.
With that in mind, an interface works for accepting an item as an argument. If a function parameter calls for an array or an ArrayList, that's the only thing you can pass to it. If a function parameter calls for an IEnumerable it will accept either, as well as a number of other objects. It's more useful
The return value, however, works opposite. When you return an IEnumerable, the only thing you can do is enumerate it. If you have a List handy and return that then code that calls your function can also easily do a number of other things, like get a count.
I stand united with those advising you to get away from the ArrayList, though. Generics are so much better.
An interface is a contract between the implementation and the user of the implementation.
By using an interface, you allow the implementation to change as much as it wants as long as it maintains the contract for the users.
It also allows multiple implementations to use the same interface so that users can reuse code that interacts with the interface.
You don't say what language you're talking about, but in something .NETish, then it's no more work to return an IList than a List or even an ArrayList, though the mere mention of that obsolete class makes me think you're not talking about .NET.
An interface is essentially a contract that a class has certain methods or attributes; programming to an interface rather then a direct implementation allows for more dynamic and manageable code, as you can completely swap out implementations as long as the "contract" is still held.
In the case you describe, passing an interface does not give you a particular advantage, if it were me, I would pass the ArrayList with the generic type, or pass the Array itself: list.toArray()
Actually you shouldn't return a List if thats a framework, at least not without thinking it, the recommended class to use is a Collection. The List class has some performance improvements at the cost of server extendability issues. It's in fact an FXCop rule.
You have the reasoning for that in this article
Return type for your method should be IList<Employee>.
That means that the caller of your method can use anything that IList offers but cannot use things specific to ArrayList. Then if you feel at some point that LinkedList or YourCustomSuperDuperList offers better performance or other advantages you can safely use it within your method and not screw callers of it.
That's roughly interfaces 101. ;-)